Columbia's growth sparks protests

Opponents say the university is being insensitive to the history of the community and that its project would displace poor, minority families who have long struggled to earn a living there.

"Columbia's proposal is an all-or-nothing plan that would mean the essential devastation of our community," said Tom DeMott, spokesman for the Coalition to Preserve Community.

The project echoes another expansion dispute in 1968, when riots erupted over Columbia's plans to build a gymnasium in a public park. The university's proposal to build separate entrances for students and the public struck some in that racially charged era as discriminatory, and the gym was never built.

School president Lee Bollinger, who arrived at Columbia as a law student in 1968, said the climate is far different today than it was in that tumultuous era -- and insists the project won't ruin the neighborhood.

"We're all aware of how the battles of that era hurt both our urban neighborhoods and great universities like this one. Forty years later this is a very different city and a very different Columbia," he said.

Columbia officials call their project essential if the school is to remain competitive with other top universities. It currently has half the space of Harvard University and a third that of Princeton and Yale.

The proposed expansion -- with a first phase to be completed by 2015, and the second by 2030 -- would nearly double the size of the Morningside Heights campus the university has occupied since 1897.

The opposition to Columbia's expansion isn't unique -- but other campuses have shown such tension can be eased. In Connecticut, Yale University's effort to mend relations between the campus and community has been a model.

The university started a program to help university employees buy homes in neighborhoods near the campus, and Yale bought and restored blighted buildings in two central shopping districts. Yale now owns dozens of storefronts and is New Haven's largest retail landlord.